St Kilda, Melbourne

Here’s a few photos from St Kilda in Melbourne. It’s a fancy coastal suburb of Melbourne filled with inter­war bunga­lows, with a pier and esplanade. In the 1960s it was run down and where all the hippies lived, but is now back to being fancy. I went there because there are wild penguins living on the pier and I hoped to see some. Unfor­tu­nately I didn’t manage to spot any that day.

A walk along an empty beach

Not many people are getting to the beach these days, but I live right next to it (in fact I can see the sea from my living room window). It’s strange to live in a tour­ist town when there are no tour­ists.

Robert Smith’s Cabbages

A couple of years ago I went down to Aldwick, near Bognor Regis for the summer to house-sit a relative’s house. I ended up being stran­ded there due to a lengthy train strike. Robert Smith of the Cure is prob­ably the only famous local resid­ent. The owner of one of the local shops told me where he lived, and I went along to see it once out of curi­os­ity. The house was dull and expens­ive look­ing, but the beach it stands next to was much more Robert Smith like, with windswept shingle like Dunge­ness and rare sea cabbages. I never bothered to look at Robert Smith’s house again, but I made many trips to the beach because I liked it so much. I was usually the only person there.

Bismuth

Hello from the south­ern hemi­sphere. Here’s some new press shots of my friends’ band Bismuth I took a few weeks ago at the origin­al UK Botany Bay…

Very Friendly

Here’s some photo­graphs I took of my friends’ band Very Friendly. For a while we had inten­ded to take some promo shots with a miser­able day at the beach theme, and then the beach was suddenly covered in thick snow, so this happened over a lunch break. Harry even­tu­ally got warm again. Even­tu­ally.

Mont St Michel

I went to Mont St Michel last week for the first time in years. It’s a medi­ev­al abbey on an island on the border between Normandy and Brit­tany, about an hour’s drive from my mum’s house in France. We went there a few times when I was a kid, and the last time I was there was in the late 90s on a school trip. It has dramat­ic­ally changed since then.

There was some­thing a bit seedy and cynic­al about the place in the 90s despite the spec­tac­u­lar town itself. Buses and cars drove over the cause­way to the island, and parked in a decrep­it carpark on the shore, which had a tend­ency to flood. As you made your way up through the snak­ing medi­ev­al street to the abbey at the top of the peak, there were endless shops selling cheap replica hunt­ing knives, saucy post­cards and boxes of fire­crack­ers. It must have been a night­mare for teach­ers super­vising school groups.

Slide film photo­graphs of Whit­stable

I used to do a lot of photo­graphy, but I don’t do half as much now, which is a bit of a pity. My flickr account (which I star­ted in 2007) has 376 albums and 4976 photos. I thought I’d do some regu­lar posts with photos from some of the older albums. I’ll tag them as “from the archives”, espe­cially as a lot of them are from well before I star­ted this blog, or moved it from blog­ger to word­press. Here are some photos from a trip to Whit­stable in Janu­ary 2008. It was my birth­day, and I went on a trip to the coast with my friend Bryony and our then boyfriends. I had this Kodak slide duplic­a­tion film I’d got in a giant bag of expired film I’d got for 50p per roll a few years earli­er, and kept in the freez­er. I’m not sure if it was taken with a Lomo LCA or an Olym­pus XA2. I had both at the time. I still have them in a box under the bed, but they’re both slightly broken, because I got them very, very cheaply second-hand (I think they were both about £15). I should get round to fixing them at some point. I think they’re fixable. These pictures were cross processed in C41, and then scanned. The pictures on my flickr account are a little small by modern stand­ards, but screens were smal­ler then, and stor­age space on Flickr limited. I still have the negat­ives filed away, anyway.

москва в брайтон

I have been busy recently, and the ever-present back­log of photos and so on I mean to post gets ever longer. Here’s some photos I took of Brighton Pier at some point. I have no idea when I took them, prob­ably when I lived in Brighton, but I scanned them the other week.

The world is not my oyster

Here are the other photos from Whistable. I took more of the boats, seashore etc with my wide-angle lens on film, and I haven’t had it developed yet. I much prefer my film SLR to my digit­al one (70s Pentax camer­as just feel so nice to use), but I’m too broke lately to use much film, and I still have 5 rolls sitting around that need devel­op­ing. I didn’t eat any oysters while I was there, because I’m veget­ari­an, but I did have a really great mascar­pone, truffle and rose­mary pizza.

Hast­ings Summer of 2006

I got some films developed a little while ago, and it turned out some of them are from quite a while ago, and had been lurk­ing around in draw­ers for a long time. This one is from 2006. I’m not sure what camera I took these with, some kind of box camera or Diana or some­thing.

Day out with my sister

In Octo­ber, my sister came to see me in Brighton (I miss you!) with her 3 sons, dog and boyfriend in tow and we went for a walk on the beach and an excel­lent pub lunch. I took some pictures, but didn’t scan the film until recently. No spec­tac­u­lar pictures, but a nice day out.

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Categorised as Photography

Broad­stairs

Here’s some pictures I took in Broad­stairs last summer, they were languish­ing on my hard-drive until this week­end.

Hello from Corn­wall

Today we went to the beach, but I didn’t bring my digit­al camera because I was (rightly it turns out after I nearly fell in a rock­pool) concerned about break­ing it. I did bring my lomo fisheye though.

Hazy Sea

I went for a walk along the beach whilst wait­ing to meet up with my cous­in, who’s just moved to Brighton. There was a haze on the sea that day, and the pier looked like it was float­ing on noth­ing. I never get tired of photo­graph­ing the seafront.

A wander along the beach

One of my New Year’s Resol­u­tions was to trawl back through forgot­ten photos on my hard drive/​negatives folder and post-process them. This was one of the first untouched folders I found. Back in Septem­ber, I went for a walk along the beach along Hove Lawns, right up to Portslade. It was a beau­ti­ful day, and there was hardly anyone about, because it was the middle of the week, and the tour­ist season had pretty much finished.

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Categorised as Travel, UK
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